She's a tomb raider, not a corpse bomber. As great as the skill tree is, I refuse to unlock the perk that allows you to rig slain enemies with explosives. This incarnation of Tomb Raider still seems more violent than it needs to be. Aggression, too - she attacks with a bloodthirsty ferocity that's off-putting, if perhaps necessary to sell the idea of a slender five-footer taking down an armoured hulk with a single blow.
The animators give her determination, smooth precision and power, and humanity too in the way she wrings out her ponytail when she climbs out of water. Crystal Dynamics' artists give her a compact frame, well shod and practically dressed, and lavish detail on the tools of her trade: the customised pistol hanging from her belt, the hand-crafted quiver, the reinforced climbing axes. In action, though, this Lara means business. The cut-glass accent is about the only thing that's left.
If the imperious, almost callous James Bond vibe of the old Lara is ever to make a comeback, it won't be this time. Rise of the Tomb Raider keeps the tone but skimps on the character work, rendering her flat: a cut-price Katniss Everdeen, bow over one shoulder, chip on the other. (I recently played all three Uncharted games and, though their plots are just as flimsy and their gameplay more basic, I found myself missing their levity and sense of romance.) Whether or not you agree with the direction Crystal Dynamics and Pratchett took Lara in three years ago, it at least moved her toward a three-dimensional humanity. Luddington delivers her lines in a breathy, reverent drawl, with a laboured seriousness, rarely allowing an edge of humour or steel into her voice. It's pretty silly stuff, but the real trouble is the excess of gravitas and lack of zest in Rhianna Pratchett's script and in Camilla Luddington's performance as Lara. The unpopular deal doesn't look likely to pay off for either party. Microsoft bought a period of Xbox exclusivity for Rise of the Tomb Raider, expecting a headline-grabbing fight with Uncharted 4 - which was promptly delayed into 2016. Lara is thus furnished with a MacGuffin to chase, an army of sinister goons to murder, an extremely unconvincing lost tribe to ally with, and a motivation to privately brood over. (Traditions are all well and good, but this genre could probably use a narrative shake-up.) The trail was laid by her father, whose claims about the artifact, a deathless prophet, and a centuries-old evil secret society called Trinity earned him public ridicule and might have caused his death. The set-up is straight from any previous Tomb Raider or, for that matter, any Uncharted: Lara's on the trail of an ancient artifact of mystical power, said to bestow eternal life and reside in a legendary lost city. The Tomb Raider's rise might have to wait until after therapy. It's a game with a bad case of second-act syndrome. Developer Crystal Dynamics serves a preposterous yarn about a lost civilisation in the Siberian wilderness with a sombre straight face, saddling our heroine with obsessive daddy issues to work through. Even as Rise of the Tomb Raider's lightweight but sturdy framework for character development propels Lara to a capability her former self would have envied - survivalist, commando, craftswoman, fluent in ancient Mongolian and able to lethally overpower warriors twice her size - its storyline arrests her development.